What do you know firsthand about “conflicted callings”? Welcome to Part III of my conversation with Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLemore about her new book Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling. This week we are taking her third chapter about conflicted vocations as our launch point.
Conflicted callings for ministers
In Pastoral Imagination, I wrote about two vocations for ministers. We hold family or communal life in one hand and the work of ministry in the other hand. Yet, as Bonnie points out in her new book, conflicted callings are about so much more than the tug of partners, parenting, or children. It is a challenge to figure where to put our caring energies for families, children, elders, and our own well-being. Yet it is about more than a simple matter of where to spend our energy.
“Ministry is one of the most conflicted callings,” says Bonnie. “Why? Because you are the person of all trades. You have responsibilities for many things. How do you choose?”
Bonnie asked aloud: How do you sustain institutions with really few resources? Without damaging your own health? These and related questions point out the complexity of the work of ministry.
Sometimes the conflict is within the family
Have you ever had to wrestle with your vocation or calling to family? Many people I know, across a range of social locations, and especially people in white families are facing some big challenges right now. Their love and devotion to family is on one side, and a feeling that they would like to breakup with their family is on the other side … over the political, economic, and spiritual condition of the United States in this moment.
Divisions in this country cut right through the middle of many families – and churches. The differences in world views runs deep and makes more than just Thanksgiving dinner uncomfortable. Of course, some of our 3MMM community live outside the U.S., and yet you may also recognize this situation in which your calling to family is conflicted by deeply differing values. Our current condition in the U.S. is acute.
And let’s be clear, the stakes are not about mere differences of opinion. Since January 20 we are seeing destructive actions that are threatening lives, job security, safety, and basic human health and well-being. The devastation of democracy itself. Sixty-plus years of social and legal gains written to protect people who are minoritized and marginalized are flying out the window. Research on life-saving drugs and treatments is halted. A baseless trade war is destroying the economy. In my own state legislators are debating new laws to turn immigrant children away from public education. And most dangerously, executive orders are erasing Black and brown lives, undercutting Indigenous Peoples, disappearing immigrants, violating the integrity and health of lgbtiqa+ folx, and normalizing violence against women.
Conflicted on every side
If your calling is to love your neighbors, pray for your enemies, and treat other humans as you would hope to be treated, then your calling is conflicted on every side at this moment. Urgent needs for our advocacy, attention, repentance, and vision are literally calling to us from headline after headline.
I appreciate what Bonnie says in our interview:
“This is a heavy and challenging time for vocation. The social, cultural, political, global climate is shaping us and putting pressure on us and making it difficult. Additional pressure. We’re trying to just live our lives.”
But that can become the problem, right? Just trying to live our lives as if nothing more urgent is happening, only adds to our stress level, and it further conflicts our callings. Ignoring the social issues is no real solution or relief. Inaction and fearful (rather than prayerful) silence are still choices. And every choice has consequences. Many people are waking up to consequences they did not intend with their votes last fall.
Calling to Care
Some of you are living in situations and seasons in which care for family is your only calling. Your choices are clear.
Yet I can’t imagine that you feel the strain and pull of larger concerns any less in relation to your other vocation(s) for work and purpose. For example, last spring my faculty colleagues wrote well over a hundred emails to each other trying to resolve the careful wording of a statement about the war in Gaza and the destruction that was cutting short the lives of children, elders, and families. I was so consumed by a long season of a multi-layered family crisis of my own, that I could only barely respond to any of those very important emails.
My guilt and regret about my lack of participation was hard. And depressing. There are times when we simply cannot do everything, or much of anything, beyond the immediate demands of our day-to-day lives.
Nothing nice or tidy
In Follow Your Bliss, Bonnie puts the problem this way:
“But life doesn’t work out in this nice tidy fashion. There’s nothing monolithic about calling. We lie about calling when we don’t mention that everyone has multiple desires and faces an ongoing clash of commitments as diverse callings demand our time, attention, care, and energy. Different from missed or blocked callings, the challenge here is not restriction or limitation but abundance, overabundance, and depletion. It’s not that we don’t know what we want or can’t decide; we want too much. We haven’t given up a calling or gotten blocked. No, all we’ve done is add on” (pp. 66-67).
When Bonnie’s “clash of commitments” meets the current “clash of values” in our families or in the churches we lead, some of us find ourselves in a truly difficult place. In one hand we hold commitments and values for the lives and livelihoods of our neighbors, and on the other side is a demonization and fear of those very same neighbors, wrapped in an American flag and holding a Bible. This is Christian Nationalism (a misuse of Christian and patriotic symbols and language as cover for deep fears about the loss of white power).
Conflict based on misused symbols
Christian nationalism is driving wedges of division into our families, churches, neighborhoods, and nation. It is an ideology that has been used to motivate people to make choices that are anything but Christian. And when we encounter this ideology in our own families and faith communities, we are faced with making some hard decisions about how to speak up, where to put our energy, which stories to tell, and what we risk for the sake of love.
This misuse of Christian symbols and language, the total lack of humility, and the violence that is stirred up by the rhetoric of Christian nationalism evokes in me feelings of anger and disgust in my heart. The idea of speaking kindly about this topic to anyone who holds onto Christian nationalist beliefs feels beyond me.
That cannot be the end of the story, however. There are important risks – for the sake of love and freedom – to be taken. They don’t call it a calling for nothing,
Navigating conflicted callings
Some of Bonnie’s suggestions in this week’s interview for how to cope with the conflict baked into your calling, include:
- Lowering expectations
- Practicing “good enough” – parenting, teaching, leading, etc.
- Embracing our own efforts with grace and appreciation
These efforts all embody compassion for ourselves and for others. What would it look like if every risk we took to speak out against erasures of people and their histories, calling our elected leaders, advocating for children, standing together against Christian nationalism, was all done with such deep compassion? How would it affect the stories we tell, the tone we take, the visions of beloved community we want to share? In what ways would such compassion make a difference when we speak of our concerns to our families, our neighbors, our fellow church members?
How are you navigating your conflicted callings?
Here is a prayer for you and for all of us.
O God, embolden courage and compassion in hearts to speak for what is right. Help us take risks and responsibility for our speech and our actions. Show us how to live creatively within the many callings that bear on our lives. Help us transform conflict into community and compassion when we reach for connections you have placed all around us.
